Words Falling From the Sky

There is a little girl who catches
Words as they fall from the sky…
She lets them melt on
Her tongue like snowflakes.

There are sweet words and bitter words
And words that are way too hard for her to swallow.
Words that are too hot to hold
And words that she just wants to cuddle.

She wants to take some of the words
And hide them under her pillow,
Leave them there like baby teeth
Then wait for morning when
The words will turn into treasure.

There are words soft as wool
That she can weave into stories
And words as hard as diamonds
That cannot be cut.
Words that gleam and others
That evaporate.


She is a lonely little girl
Who no one talks to really.


They throw words at her
And make her carry them like stones
In heavy buckets that she
Shuttles between them
Again and again.

The words enter her heart
Like poisoned darts and her blood
Becomes the highway for these words
To travel all through her.
Words she doesn’t want to say.
Words she doesn’t want to hear.

She wants the other words,
The ones beyond her reach,
The ones that look like stars
That rest on her earlobes
That caress her neck and wrists.

She is a little girl with a butterfly net
Chasing after the words
That have escaped from her heart
That float through the air
Too high for her to reach.
She jumps higher and higher
Until she falls to the ground alone.

Lying on her back in the grass,
She looks up at the great big blue sky
And sees that the words have become balloons
That pop pop pop into silence.


Suddenly, her mother’s scream pierces the air.
Shattering the silence, words tumble on top of her
Her father’s curses land in all of her soft places
Bruising her skin, punching her arms,
Slapping her face, thrusting inside of her.

She wants to find the words
That can shove them back into silence.

She will lie on the ground still as death
Dreaming of the beautiful words that got away.